Abstract

Mass violence, considered as a set of widespread and collective aggressions lead against a civil population represents a major security issue of the 21st Century. As such, the elaboration of analytical tools allowing us to understand its nature remains crucial. This article proposes the idea that genocide, as a prevalent paradigm used to grasp that phenomenon, holds relative heuristic value confronted to contemporary massacres such as the events that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Firstly, we draw a genesis of the genocide and then some of the epistemological sources that established it as a paradigm. Then, a short ontology of mass violence that happened in Bosnia will be sketched out. This will lead us to the observation that some extermination patterns remain unexplained by the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group based upon their ethnical, national, religious or racial membership; or by a bureaucracy and a chain of command such as proposed by the genocide paradigm. To conclude, we draw a few propositions to help the elaboration of a new paradigm able to grasp the new patterns revealed.